"Your trap door is shut," the wife announced, right after she'd let the heelers out for their first morning constitutional.

I actually stayed in bed a while, and later got up to brush teeth and shave. Only then did I head into the kitchen to check the live trap.

Pretty sure we had something in it, since the wife said she heard scrabbling inside when fixing breakfast.

So, when I lifted it off the cutting board, I wasn't surprised to hear tiny little toenails scratching on the aluminum sides. Nor to feel weight shifting inside the long box.

I was surprised at the heft of it. Felt like there was a little more mouse inside than I had anticipated.

And I was right.

Instead of the tiny, bland Mus musculus I was expecting, a peek inside found me staring face to face with a Peromyscus.

Otherwise known as a white-footed deer mouse.

Craaap.

While the tiny Mus musculus, or common house mouse, is an imported exotic, which probably came to the New World on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria and every other sailing ship that crossed the Atlantic, the larger Peromyscus is a native.

And also happens to be the species that carries the ticks that carry lime disease (although, not around here, as far as I know). They're also the species that carries the hantavirus, which I know has been confirmed in deer mice just seven miles from here.

And we got pee and feces from this mouse on our kitchen counter. And kitchen cutting board. And who knows where else.

Craaap.

At least now we know sloe pits make good bait for white-footed deer mice.

So, first things first. Mousy goes outside, and gets re-introduced to the wild in the brush pile in the former garden (now cherry/ peach/ nectarine/ apple/ chokecherry/ sloe orchard). Which is a little worrisome, since I happen to know that the normal home range for these critters is measured in fractions of acres, not square feet or meters.

In other words, if this rodent knows of a secret passage into our home, the garden is almost certainly within its normal home range, and it will be back. If it was just an accidental visitor via our front door being left open too often too long, it may still get back.

The wife and I extract all the towels from the open towel drawer, expecting to find a mouse nest and forty-some sloe pits, and we find neither. Just the same, all the dish towels, hand towels, and dish cloths head into the laundry.

Later in the morning, I drive the outfit's rig in for more repairs. And enjoy the almost two-mile walk uptown to steal the Explorer from the wife.

Then it is home, to wipe and sanitize everything on the counter and cutting board. Spice bottles, cannisters, coffee packages swiped from motel rooms, individual honey packages from fast food joints. Every available flat space in the kitchen has something freshly cleaned and sanitized on it. I get it all, except the toaster, and the wife's cans awaiting recycling (an indoor habit I despise).

I did dump the toaster, just to make sure it wasn't housing a mouse nest, or forty-some sloe pits.

By five o'clock, I'm back in town, returning the stolen Explorer. And the masked heeler and I make the two-mile trek back to reclaim the outfit's truck. (She did well for the first mile, tugging all the way, smelling everything she could. Halfway past the Fairgrounds, the leash went suddenly slack, and she threw looks up me, wondering why we weren't driving instead of hiking. By the last few blocks, I had the leash at half length to keep out the slack. Tired heeler.)

Before the wife and eldest son get home, I'm gone again, for a workshop in town a fellow from our outfits is giving to teach people how to live in lion country. (We've had several reliable sightings of mountain lion in town in the past couple months.)

When I get home a little before nine o'clock, do I find dinner awaiting?

Nope.

I find the wife just finishing up her efforts of sterilizing everything in the kitchen. All the things I had already cleaned. Somehow she never thought that I might actually clean something. Much less sterilize it.

Ah, well. At least she got the toaster done. And her cans.

And she checked the cabinets, too.

No mouse nest. No cache of forty-some sloe pits.

I'm guessing the mouse was using the dining room couch, but it's way too big a job to check right now, with all the wife's "garage sale" items filling that room. My only worry is that this may have been just the lead scout, and we've a whole army of rodents invading our domicile (the wife is wondering about the plate of pumpkin seeds that was mysteriously emptied a month ago).

So, yeah. The live trap is set again tonight.

If we catch anything, we escalate to snap traps.